Washington DC--The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published Digital Preservation , SPEC Kit 325, which explores the strategies that ARL member institutions use to protect evolving research collections and the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders. The survey asked ARL libraries about their digital content, their strategies for preserving that content, and the staff, time, and funding they currently devote to digital preservation. It also asked each responding library to compare its digital preservation activities of three years ago to current activities and project three years into the future. In addition, to better understand the roles of research libraries in the emergent field of digital curation, the survey sought to identify issues that are and are not being addressed through current practices and policies.

This survey revealed, as the digital preservation field is maturing, that most ARL libraries are rising to the challenge of establishing policies, workflows, and infrastructures to systematically preserve their rapidly expanding bodies of digital content. The survey also revealed that most ARL libraries are actively engaging in in-house digital preservation rather than outsourcing it to external parties, thus maintaining their control and ownership over the digital content that they curate.

This SPEC Kit includes documentation from respondents that describes policies, procedures, and guidelines for digital preservation, cooperative agreements, job descriptions, and data management services.

The table of contents and executive summary from this SPEC Kit are available online at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/spec-325-web.pdf .

ORDERING INFORMATION


SPEC Kit 325, Digital Preservation
Gail McMillan, Matt Schultz, and Katherine Skinner • October 2011 • ISBN 1-59407-869-6 • 158 pp. • $45 ($35 ARL members)

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SPEC KITS EXCHANGE INFORMATION


Designed to examine current research library practices and policies and serve as resource guides for libraries as they face ever-changing management problems, each SPEC Kit contains a summary analysis, survey questions with tallies, pertinent documentation from participating libraries, and a reading list and Web site references for further information on the topic.

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2011 SPEC Kit subscription (ISSN 0160-3582): $225 ARL member/$300 nonmember, six issues per year, shipping included (additional postage may apply outside North America).

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 126 research libraries in the US and Canada. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/ .

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